Man I loved Hawken, shame it never really got big.
The mech designs were all so cool, IMO.
Hawken was just way more arcadey than I wanted it to be, such a shame because it looked so great
I played the shit out of Hawken back in the day. It was a ton of fun.
I got into Hawken in the very end of alpha testing and played through all three rounds of closed beta testing before it launched to the public. There are a few details the video either glossed over or completely didn't even mention.
The core beta community consensus, such as I understand it, is that the version of the game in closed beta test 2 (CBT2) was the best version. CBT3 reduced TTK by approximately half and enabled a light mech to be capable of nearly one-shotting almost every mech except a defensively-turreted heavy. This was the beginning of the warning signs.
Adhesive then shut down access to the game for... a few days and then went live with the public beta. It was CBT3... with microtransaction consumables called countermeasures. Countermeasures were once-per-match consumables that let you basically ignore a limiting game mechanic; you could only equip one of the three at a time. One countermeasure was a hard counter to the EMP item mechanic, just completely negating the first EMP blast that hits you. Another countermeasure let you ignore the overheat mechanic once; in Hawken your weapons would raise your heat level and if you overheated your weapons would be disabled for a few seconds. Managing your heat with selective burst fire became a measure of player skill and separated you from full-auto overheating morons -- especially important with the last primary upgrade for the CR-T Assault (aka Fred), the vulkan cannon. The heat countermeasure would let you just hit max heat and automatically drop you back to zero without penalizing you for the overheat. The third countermeasure was a decoy which was at least okay.
Making the countermeasures worse was, when they launched into open beta they gave everyone a supply of countermeasures, with the idea that you'd get used to them being there and then you'd buy more when you ran out. I personally made a point to never equip them and I never used my day-1 open beta supply.
More consumables appeared in the form of holographic taunts, which basically threw out a little puck that'd play a taunt. These didn't affect gameplay but they were just kind of dumb so nobody really used them, so whatever. Of all of the things Adhesive was doing, this was the least offensive because it was harmless.
But I haven't even gotten to the best parts.
https://www.playhawken.com/images/media/comics/HK002006.jpg
Did you know there was an official HAWKEN graphic novel miniseries?
Also holy fucking shit I just now discovered there were two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFQ7Pg07edc
Did you know there was money spent on developing a pilot for a live-action web series that was supposed to begin in 2013? (But didn't.)
And Meteor had plans of a live-action film, an anime, more comics, and novels? Those didn't go anywhere either, and any money spent developing pitches for them was wasted.
Khang Le, HAWKEN's creative lead, wanted HAWKEN to be the next Halo so badly he didn't even wait before the first game in the franchise had made a stable launch. Meteor Entertainment took a huge gamble by raising a shitton of investor money, and it exploded in their faces as they spread themselves too thin on an unproven IP.
Meteor also mismanaged their community team and their forum moderation team but I cannot be fucked to get into that right now because I'm still pissed about it. All you need to know is that for the official HAWKEN forums, Meteor paid some third-party company to have three anonymous moderator accounts managing the forum, in addition to the game's community managers (who were hired and managed by Meteor, not Adhesive). All around, Meteor owns a lot of the blame because they did not know what they were doing and made major obvious blunders. At the same time, I cannot fault them for trying to go big -- they'd taken so much investment money they had to make money roll in somehow. It's just that Meteor blew through the budget too quickly and spent some of it on the dumbest shit.
Apparently there does some to be some playable Hawken private servers using a 2014 build:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hawken/comments/9kuzui/hawken_private_server_pc/
Heh, I knew it'd be Ashfire. He preserved a copy of every major build, and got me to give him my copy of the final alpha build.
I think they removed the dash backwards at some point, instead replacing it with an instant 180.
The game was probably too far gone at this point but I think the final nail in the coffin was the Technician class, which completely negated one of the biggest and most unique gameplay aspects of Hawkin. That is, knowning when to disengage and find somewhere to repair safely. I guess they were looking for ways to lure in more casual shooter fans into the game but it completely backfired. I quit shortly after this.
You always could 180, though. That was the thing noobs struggled to grasp and would complain about "negative mouse acceleration" while experiencing HAWKEN's turning speed cap. In HAWKEN, to underline that you're in a giant scrap of metal and to make tactical choices important, you could only turn left and right so quickly -- but you could do an instant 180 so if you were totally facing the wrong way you had a much better alternative than to slooooooooooowly round all the waaaaay arrrooooouuund the compass to face the guys lighting your ass up.
By the time the Technician class came in, TTK was so low and so fucked anyway it didn't matter, it was a step in the "right" direction if you believed that HAWKEN needed to become like TF2 with mechs, but it was already so far gone from its roots that fuck it you might as well.
I miss ruining people's day with this skin on (can't find a good pic of it on any other mech):
https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/hawken/4/43/Screen1.jpg
Wait there was even a card game what the fuuuck
The fuck did they think was going to fund all these side ventures? The game wasn't even... a game yet.
The Scout was always my favorite. I loved the hit-and-run style, and It was so strange looking but I absolutely adored it.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/222665/41a65ed9-c888-4f30-8d90-5721a47f6153/moke.jpg
Also he is underselling how crazy the monetization is. Learning that they spent so much money funding the game plus the side ventures makes sense now. Everything was monetized in Hawken and none of it was good value. I've thrown money at several F2P games over the years but I never even considered paying for anything in Hawken.
I can see your point but it was just overbearing. It felt like if one team had a Technician (or god help you, two) and the other team didn't there was no chance to win because they could just keep their team healed up while your guys had to run back and repair. Except you couldn't run away because the Tech made dives completely safe. I convinced a friend to join me just before we quit and I think he finished with a 95% win rate or something absurd like that because every match we played together I just pocket healed him.
I played HAWKEN for a few weeks on an old PC when it was is beta and I really liked it. I came back to it very shortly before it shut down and it was like playing a different game. At some point between beta and shutdown they changed the HUD so that it was just a flat 2D HUD rather than using the actual displays inside the mechs, which looked really fucking dumb, and the game overall felt like it wanted to be anything but a weighty mech game.
A damn shame, it was probably the last multiplayer game I was actually excited for.
Games dead/going to die?
Damn, I wanted to try this but always put this on the side.
Ross Scott was right.
https://i.imgur.com/fhZay.jpg
Sometimes I wish I could go back to this. I loved this aesthetic so much. I just wish I'd had a better computer back then.
https://i.imgur.com/Kqapl.jpg
I loved Fred and mained it a lot. For a little while I had Jedi-tier prediction powers with the secondary missile launcher. Also this screenshot shows the hated countermeasures (REEEEE).
The skins were okay but the fact that you had to buy them on a per-mech basis was not. I also enjoyed my alpha and beta tester skins. Well, I did until my account vanished in a database snafu and I couldn't log in anymore, taking my paid stuff and my alpha/beta tester goodies with it.
I play Mechwarrior 4 to get that stompy mech combat itch off but man, nothing really matches the arcadyness and mech feel of HAWKEN
I really wish developers/publishers would stop trying to be the next WoW/League/Halo/CSGO etc. especially when the game isnt even out yet
Being ambitious is fine but you cant just say "this the new thing!" and then expect everything to just work, so much games failed because they tried to be the next big thing and couldnt keep running
I was one of the early alpha testers for Hawken (Alpha 2 I believe) and it felt like an amazing game that slowly got worse over time. From being a shooter that had a tight knight and legitimately wholesome community to a shell of its self as the game was patched into oblivion. To this day I have no idea how you could make a product worse every update and squander such potential. It was a mech game that was also an arcade shooter with unique mechanics that tied both together and nothing will be like it again.
Somewhat off topic but I'm not sure where else to ask: Were you able to fix the mouse issue with Mechwarrior 4 on Windows 10? A few months back I tried playing the game and while the gameplay held up well I found it really hard to aim due to the game not really registering my DPI at all.
This game was fun for me for like an hour, then it got boring. I don't why.
I found my old copy of the alpha 2 build, the very final release before they went to closed beta and introduced more than the two original maps, Sahara and Andromeda. I can't change loadouts or mechs because there's literally no accounts infrastructure to talk to anymore, never mind it feeding the right data, and I don't know console commands that'd let me, but I know how to load maps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLHgNtHjlIY
There's a console command to add bots but they spawn in broken and immobile and without models. Also, in this build, hitting F7 or F8 cycles through debug rendering modes, including wireframe -- which is how I know there's an underground complex in the Sahara map that was probably meant to be used for either cinematics or an unused objective area. Cheats can be enabled so maybe I'll try and noclip down there sometime to check it out.
The devs accidentally pushed one of the CBT builds out with these debug rendering modes left in, and I quietly let them know before players realized they could turn on undetectable wallhacks.
To come back to this in hindsight, if you meant that they introduced the air 180, yes, yes they did.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/2304/727a6b57-25a3-46aa-992b-30cd287fef02/image.png
*sigh*
They sure did.
Yeah, i found the aiming a bit hard but im not 100% sure of the mouse issue since I cant tell if the aiming is supposed to be like that in game or the game doesnt support mouse control
The Mech designs were certainly unique, they had a look to them that made them look like they were built by some people in their garage, as opposed to some high end factory, I quite liked that about the game, it the aesthetics to stand out, but I do think the Microtransactions were a little stupid.
From my time playing it (and I played quite a bit from early stages to late), there was a small and very vocal group of players that wanted faster combat; I remember stumbling on a huge discussion on it on their forums once about it.
Wonky matchmaking, poor monetization (more for their sake), and radical but dubious balance changes really caused the game to suffer.
Aw, that sucks, but I'm not surprised - it never was big, and I had the feel that the controls are kinda clunky. But an excellent concept either way.
I had a good amount of fun with Hawken in the days before its balance patches hit. There was just something about how the game's combat felt combined with the game's aesthetic that just really hit me in a good way. The monetization system wasn't great at all, but I somehow still had a blast playing it. I was hopeful for it.
But then yeah, it came out on Steam with some balance changes, I played, and I didn't enjoy the game at all anymore.
I remember hearing various news bits here and there after that essentially showing that the game was dying, and while I accepted it, I always held out the tiniest hope that it would somehow come back. Well, at least until Reloaded bought it. Then, I knew it was practically dead.
I think the only games I've played since that really captured the whole fast paced first person mech combat for me was Titanfall and Titanfall 2. Amazing games that were shafted by terrible marketing decisions.
Maybe NerdSlayer is right. The mech combat genre is just cursed...
The good news is that Mechwarrior 5 is in development
The bad news is that it is being made by the people who run Mechwarrior Online...
I tried playing and there was only one guy online and I couldn't connect to his match. Game's dead it seems.
They do scheduled games, and there's the #find-a-game channel for trying to arrange matches. It's pretty quiet but not totally dead. And of course it's not very active, it's a private server for a completely dead PC game. (And there are like a hundred people playing across both console versions.)
Haven't installed it yet, how does that build feel?
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